Interesting comment regarding state rights

[John98]

Here's an interesting comment I just came across:

"Almost every State in the Union in turn declared its own sovereignity [sic] and denounced as almost treasonable similar declarations in other cases by other States."

-- American historian Alexander Johnston (1849-1889), quoted in the preface to State Documents on Federal Relations: The States and the United States, published in 1906 by the University of Pennsylvania (Herman V. Ames, ed.).

U. of Penn. historian Herman V. Ames in turn wrote, in 1906, that Johnston's comment is "fully sustained" by the documents.
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John

[James_Longstreet]

OK... ...can someone explain in ENGLISH what this means???
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Allan
Time sets all things right. Error lives but a day. Truth is eternal.
A Great Civilization is not Conquered from Without until It has Destroyed Itself from Within

[John98]

OK -- what I think Johnston's comment means is that, if you look at the history of the states before the CW, you'll see that almost every state, at one time or another, asserted that it was sovereign, distinguishable from the "United States" as a whole, and likewise almost every state denounced as treason the occasions when some other state made that assertion. Sometimes some states were the state-righters and other states were the Unionists, and at other times those roles were reversed.

So the secession crisis in 1860-61 was part of a pattern, only it went a lot farther than previous state-rights crises.
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John

[James_Longstreet]

Gottcha - Thanks

Well, the idiots HAD to realize that you cant have it both ways... and I guess herein lies ONE of the reasons why Confederacy failed
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Allan
Time sets all things right. Error lives but a day. Truth is eternal.
A Great Civilization is not Conquered from Without until It has Destroyed Itself from Within

[John98]

Anytime!
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John

[GeorgeWashington]

Regardless of what anyone said, the undisputed fact remains that the original 13 states were each popularly sovereign nations, prior to ratifying the Constitution.
The question, therefore, was whether the sovereign powers of those states manifested an intent to relinquish that sovereignty by ratifying the Constitution, in order to truly form one single nation.

The facts abundantly prove that the states did not-- particularly in the Federalist papers, which were assurances given by the Federalist party to the peoples of the individual states, regarding the nature of the Constitution.
The Philadelphia convention was only delegated with the power to modify the Articles of Confederation, not relinquish sovereignty; therefore the convention had no authority to relinquish sovereignty, even if the delegates did so expressly-- which they did not.

Rather, all evidence indicates that the states simply intended to form a strong federal republic, as defined under the Law of Nations as "a perpetual confederacy" which preserves the national sovereignty of every member-state, rather than relinquishing it to merge multiple nations into a single nation. This was the fear of the anti-federalists, and the Federalist papers were written to allay such fears by providing assurances to the contrary-- particularly Madison in Federalist No. 39.
As such, both the respective sovereigns and their representative delegates of each state, expessly manifested intent to retain their respective state's national sovereignty within the federal union.

This was common knowledge until the 1830's, when Jackson and various others began revising history to claim the opposite, culminating in the Civil War when some states exercised their sovereignty against the federal government's claim of national authority over them.
However legal sovereignty cannot be illegally revoked.

[James_Longstreet]

I said "ONE" of the reasons, Sir

Welcome to the Board
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Your Ob't Servant
Allan
Time sets all things right. Error lives but a day. Truth is eternal.
A Great Civilization is not Conquered from Without until It has Destroyed Itself from Within